


The Dusting of our Ghosts

by Syn (AShadowsKiss)



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), Little Mix (Band), My Chemical Romance, One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Multi, References to Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:03:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AShadowsKiss/pseuds/Syn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The years go by a lot quicker than Ghoul would have thought and he's not sure he likes it. Things change a lot but more stays the same, even as the people around him die and he's forced to keep living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dusting of our Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> For those who walked into this fic from either the 1D or LM fandom, I have to admit it's a MCR focused fic. Some understanding of the world they created with 'Danger Days; The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys' would be quite useful! Try this site if you're interested: www(.)killjoytransmissions(.)proboards(.)com/index.cgi?board=help&action=display&thread=44  
> Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and I don't own/know anyone mentioned in this fic. It's basically all lies!

2013

Better Living Industries (or BL/ind for short) settles in Los Angeles and produces pills. They make mood stabilizers. Pills that are said to help you get through the day, no matter what it throws at you. Their logo is a black and white smiley face. More and more people fall for it each and every day. 

 

2014

BL/ind opened branches all over the world. Asia, Australia, Africa, Antarctica and South-America have already fallen prey to BL/inds endless greed. They took the pills and now they're merely puppets. Europe is slowly but surely falling apart as well. The countries with free health care go down first, the pills are sneaking their way into every household, from painkillers to anti-depressants, BL/ind supplies all.  
Those who oppose BL/ind flee to North-America and settle in all the gigantic wastes of spaces North-America has. Texas and California being the most popular. They divide the area between Los Angeles, San Diego and the border to Arizona into seven zones. Texas is left as it is. 

 

2015

Europe goes down hard. BL/ind nuked everything. They wiped almost the entire United Kingdom of the map; just a small part still remains.  
Traveling is limited, airplanes are forbidden and cars are only for those who work for BL/ind. Public transport is the only way to get anywhere anymore but it's prohibited to stay on either a train or a bus for longer than thirty minutes.  
In their struggle to keep as many people who oppose them away and weak BL/ind nukes Texas. No official BL/ind personnel die in the blast, about a million civilians do.

 

2016

BL/ind shuts down the internet. It tried before but this time they succeed, not even the most powerful and sneaky hackers can find their way back in. Those who dare to try though are taken into custody, never to be seen again.

 

2017

The first dracloids appear in the streets. They wear all white suits and masks with frightening faces on them. BL/ind attempts to reassure the public that these dracloids are like what the police used to be like.  
The dracs move in pairs with slow, robotic movements. They feel cold to the touch. Taking of their masks reveals the faces of the people who BL/ind took over the years, their eyes glazed over and their minds decidedly empty.

 

2018

Dr. Death Defying makes his entrance, he plays music on every radio wave he can get his hands on and promotes colors left and right. The people living in the zones gather around him because he protects them, supplies them with reasons to keep fighting and warns them when the newly made exterminators are coming. They give themselves names that don't mean anything but a giant fuck you to BL/ind.  
They're an army and they call themselves the killjoys. They support freedom, color, music and happiness. They fight against tiny little pills and black and white smiley faces. BL/ind wants to destroy them all.  
(This is where it starts, the four of them join forces and support Dr. D's mission. They change their names to Party Poison, Fun Ghoul, Kobra Kid and Jet Star. They abandon their black and white, city supplied, clothing and start wearing yellows, greens, reds and blues again. They spray-paint their logo on ever relatively stable surface.) 

 

2019

BL/ind is still working its way up, spreading its disease across the world like an oil stain on water. Most of the world has already given in, but in most places there are still small areas or resistance, like the zones in California, so BL/ind has to keep fighting still.  
These days there are only two types of people left in the world; the BL/ind supporters, blind little puppets who happily dance at the end of their master's string and those who are still fighting against the oppression BL/ind offers. They're killjoys and zone rats alike and they won't settle for anything less than freedom.  
(Ghoul thinks it's rather ironic that those who are fighting for the happiness of others, for a chance to be free, are called killjoys. Then again, the world stopped making sense to him a long time ago.)

 

2020

BL/ind finds a new way to strengthen their troops.  
The dracloids weren't cutting it anymore. They were fine for stopping small scrimmages in the City but they were unsuited for chasing and stopping killjoys. Their leader; the one and only Korse, was the only one who managed to ghost someone every once in a while. S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W wasn't having it, found this absolutely unacceptable, especially with the way the killjoys seemed to think they were winning. So they cloned their best weapon. They found a way to clone Korse.

 

2021

Grace is dead.  
The little girl their group picked up almost three years ago, back when she was wandering through the zones at barely 12 years old and already alone and abandoned. She's dead.  
They were overwhelmed by a group of Korses.  
(K-orpses, Poison calls them, because he's convinced that the the real Korse, who was an actual human, died back in 2019 during their battle. Ghoul doesn't have the heart to tell him he couldn't have killed Korse.)  
They got knocked out and when they came to she was gone. They spent three months hunting through the zones and following leads through Battery City. They found nothing. Dr. Death Defying officially declared her dead and played her favorite The Mad Gear and Missile Kid song on repeat for an hour. 

 

2022

Party Poison and Kobra Kid are dead.  
They couldn't deal with the pain and guilt of losing Grace. They went on a suicide mission and took out nearly fifty K-orpses between them, but they were killed by the shots of nearly a thousand of them.  
(Sometimes the end don't justify the means, Ghoul thinks, but Poison always disagreed so he'll let him win this fight at least, will let him be a victor in death.)  
BL/ind released a virus into the zones not long after that, zone rats and killjoys are dropping dead all over the place. They're advised by Dr. D not to touch anyone they meet. By the force of some asshole higher power neither he nor Star manages to get the virus, no matter how hard they try.

 

2023

Battery City isn't a city anymore. It's grown over the years. Growing like a cancer, like an ulcer, spreading like a drop of ink on dry paper.  
(Ghoul hasn't seen or touched either paper or a pen in nearly three years, but he remembers being fascinated by the way a small drop of ink could spread across an empty sheet of paper with thin, spidery, blue veins running to everywhere.)  
The name has probably changed over the years. Maybe it's called Battery Country now, or New San Diego, (they nuked the original San Diego years ago and nothing that mentions angels should have anything to do with BL/ind) he's not sure. No matter what they call it, it'll always be Battery City to him.  
Zones 1, 2, 3 and 4 are now part of Battery City though, as is the rest of what used to be California. Ghoul hasn't seen a map of what used to be North-America in a long time, but if he remembers correctly Arizona, Nevada and Oregon were close by. He remembers Dr. D mentioning them being contaminated a while ago, back when Poison was still around.

 

2024

He's alone now. Or as alone as anyone ever gets in the endless desert that are the zones.  
Jet Star died a slow and painful death. He went out in the sun without his rebreather. Zone 5 wasn't as bad as zone 6, not even on its worst days, but it was still enough to kill a man.  
Ghoul had to watch as Stars brains were slowly fried on the inside of his skull, smoke tendrils escaping from his ears and nostrils. He'd like to say he took pity on his friend and shot him, gave him an easy way out, but insanity is never more than a blink away these days and watching a man die is fascinating to the bored.

 

2025

BL/ind isn't even trying anymore.  
Ghoul's pretty sure he can count the amount of killjoys left in the zones on one hand though, so he can't really blame them. He's not sure what happened to them all, if they got taken out by K-orpses (like Dr. D and Show Pony) or if they just surrendered and snuck their way into the city like frightened little children waiting to be scolded. He wonders if they settled for a life that consistent of pressing the same stupid button every single day for the rest of their lives while swallowing pills that would tell them how to feel that day and what to think. He wonders why no one came for him.

 

2026

He runs into two kids, on the edge of zone 6. There used to be a zone 7 too, it was a dangerous place but if you got through it you got to the ocean. A lot of killjoys found their deaths along the way, until BL/ind decided nuking it was a better idea.  
(Ghoul doesn't understand their reasoning at all, they want the killjoys dead but when they go and commit suicide by walking straight into zone 7 they put a halt to it and nuke the place. He's pretty sure that defies the purposes of almost everything BL/ind does in the zones.)  
There's still a little house though, on what used to be the border. It's worthless and empty, doesn't even have a Fend-a-Hack, but it's a safehouse. Probably the last one.  
It's a boy and a girl. The boy has his raygun firmly trained on Ghoul's chest but he's not even pretending to be willing to shoot. The girl sits halfway besides and behind him. She's visibly comforted by her friend's willingness to threaten an interloper.  
Ghoul has seen death though. Has seen his friends turn to dust from a simple shining white light. Has heard the cries of a hundred dying men. Has killed his fare share of people. He's been on the brink of insanity for about four years now. He's not afraid of some scumbag snot-nosed kid thinking he's a hotshot because he can keep a raygun steady. So he just pulls the cigarette from between the guy's lips and sits down beside him.  
The three of them stick together after that.

 

2027

Ghoul is tired. He doesn't have anything left to fight for. His friends are dead (he doesn't count either the boy or the girl amongst his friends, he doesn't even know their names) and BL/ind won the moment the first people willingly started taking the pills. This was way back in 2013, when people still had names and greenery wasn't what legends and myths were made of. Back when music was a common day occurrence and laughing wasn't worth the death penalty.  
The boy notices. The girl doesn't. Or maybe she does but he doesn't notice that she notices and he's to tired to pretend to care. There are no dracloids in the zones anymore. No exterminators, no K-orpses. There's nothing left to kill and there's nothing left to kill him. He'd take of his rebreather in zone 6 if it weren't for the fact that BL/ind has been working on purifying the air and it's now safe to breath. The sun isn't strong enough anymore to fry his brain the way it did for Star either. BL/ind had been shooting missiles into the suns core for about a decade now. She's slowly losing the battle.  
Ghoul wants to lose the battle with her; he's ready to be ghosted, ready to turn to dust. He has been wanting to see Poison again for a long time anyway.  
He stays alive.

 

2028

They travel together for two years before Ghoul bothers to ask their names. The boy's name is Zayn, the girl's name is Perrie. They ask him for his and he tells them his name is Fun Ghoul. It's what Poison called him, it's what Kobra and Star called him, it's what every killjoy, every zone rat called him. He tells them he doesn't even remember his real name.  
(Frank, it was Frank, back when Poison was still Gerard and they had lazy afternoon kisses and slow passionate nights and back when his mother smiled at him and there was a ring on his finger that promised eternal loyalty.)  
Ghoul asks them why they don't have code names, why they share the name their parents gave them so freely. He uses his own name like a shield and only the people he loved got to call him anything else. Zayn shrugs it of and tells him they never saw the point. They weren't from anywhere near here, there was no record of them going there and even if there was, BL/ind wasn't going to care anyway. The moment they ran into dracs they would have been killed anyway, regardless of their name.  
The dam is broken after that and they wind up talking a lot. Zayn apparently has a lot of stories to tell. Stories about his friends, stories about how he wound up in the zones though he hauls from England originally.  
("Why the fuck did you come here?"  
"England was destroyed, BL/ind nuked everything, you either joined them or you died. The nine of us managed to slip aboard one of the last aeroplanes to fly the skies. This place used to be bigger, we thought we'd be safe.")  
The nine of them. Ghoul wonders about that, how nine kids managed to survive in the zones for so long without them running into each other. Wonders if Dr. D knew them, if Show Pony did. Kobra was a star in meeting people and keeping it a secret, maybe he knew them, maybe he even helped them out a little. He's not to keen on asking though, doesn't want to think about the dust that Kobra turned into, doesn't want to think about the fact that he took his brother, Poison, down with him.  
Zayn winds up telling him everything he wants to know though, and he never has to ask. Apparently they came here with an airplane, nine kids, back in 2015, when their oldest was 24 and their youngest 21, five boys and four girls. Louis, Harry, Liam, Niall, Jesy, Jade and Leigh-Anne. They're all dead now. Ghosted. Dusted out.  
Zayn talks a lot while Perrie sits by his side and mostly just holds his hand. She doesn't talk, at all. She smokes cigarette after cigarette, lighting one with the other, she fiddles with her hair and crawls into Zayns lap, but she doesn't speak. Not even when he talks about the death of their friends and the tears stream down her face like waterfalls in fairy tales.

Niall was the first to die. Zayn talks about him with a soft voice and a fond but distant look in his eyes. Apparently the kid had been going on a food run, which he usually did with Jesy who was said to be nothing short of a miracle with any kind of weapon, but the sun was getting to her so he went alone. Walked straight into an ambush. They found him half a day later with half his face blown of.

Barely seven months later Louis and Harry followed his example. 

Perrie got up and stormed of the moment Zayn mentioned Louis, so Ghoul figures there is some bad blood there. Zayn watches her go and shrugs. Louis had been the self proclaimed leader of the group. Niall had been the baby of the group. Before Niall died they considered themselves to be more like zone rats than killjoys and Louis was itching to change that.  
He started hunting the dracs and the exterminators.  
(It doesn't go unnoticed that Zayn doesn't mention the K-orpses, Niall, Louis and Harry must have died before the clones.)  
The dracs slowly realized that they were being hunted and started hunting back. Despite the groups protests Louis didn't want to leave the dracs alone and let them go unpunished for what they did to Niall and kept chasing them. And he dragged Harry down with him.  
(When Ghoul mentions his disgust at this, at the fact that Louis was on a suicidal bender and that he was willing to take this other kid down with him, Zayn just snorts. Those two were two peas in a pot, he says, wouldn't have been able to separate them anyway.)  
The dracs caught Louis in the end though. Killed Harry in front of him, slowly in a way only dracs could, made it hurt just so Louis would pay for killing a few insignificant robotic dracloids. Then they killed him.  
Ghoul wonders how the fuck Zayn knows this shit and when he asks Zayn just laughs, though there is no humor in his voice. The rest of the group had been standing and watching nearby, unable to interfere, unable to look away. They spent three weeks digging graves for the two boys, side by side so they wouldn't have to be separate even in death.

Leigh-Anne, Jesy and Jade died three years after that. They weren't ghosted, weren't killed by dracs or K-orpses, were killed by a virus. Killed by a virus that destroyed your arteries until you bled out on the inside. 

Ghoul remembers it. Remembers how this disease suddenly popped up every where. It was incredibly contagious, the moment someone was diagnosed all you could do was kill them on the spot and burn the remains. Dr. D spent a lot of time talking about it. He was also the only guy who knew where it came from. As par for the course it came from BL/ind. Just another failed experiment. There was no cure. And even if there was, no one living in the zones would be able to get their hands on it. The virus spread like wildfire, killing dozens and dozens of zone rats and killjoys. BL/ind definitely won that round. 

The last one of their dust angels, Liam, died not long before they met Ghoul. At 32, after having spent about eleven years running through deserts and watching their friends die, he couldn't take it anymore. Got himself a pretty little raygun and swallowed the barrel. Mustn't have been a pretty sight, that which remained of him.

 

2029

Ghoul's been running for over ten years now.  
He became an official killjoy back in 2018, when there weren't that many of them yet and Dr. D was a god sent messenger of better days. His first kill was more or less an accident, some drac was sneaking up on Poison and Ghoul just didn't think, pointed the raygun and pulled the trigger. If it hadn't been an absolute piece of shit weaponry, he'd have killed Poison too. Luckily the shot barely made it through the drac's skull.  
To say he's tired of his life at this point would be an understatement. Zayn and Perrie left him not long after Zayn finished telling all his stories. Ghoul feels somewhat used for that, like he was some cheap therapist for him to vent to. Then again, he supposes he's also somewhat happy for them. BL/ind has calmed down. No more military action, less pills, still no color whatsoever but they're on the right track, Ghoul supposes. He can't begrudge those two taking their chances in the city. He'll never be able to forgive or move on though. They took his life from him, his friends, his family and his love.  
He still carries Poison's raygun with him, though it hasn't been used in seven years. Rayguns don't stop working though, as long as there's power, it'll shoot.  
Ghoul is tired. He misses the warmth of Poison's eyes and he misses the sound of Kobra's laugh. He can even admit to missing Star's endless grumbling about one thing or another.  
He swallows the barrel.


End file.
